Centrix Helps Credit Providers Make Fast, Accurate Decisions on Credit Applications on AWS

Founded in 2009 by three industry veterans, Centrix is a credit reporting agency that collects and analyzes the credit information of 4 million New Zealand consumers—over 95 percent of the local credit-active population—and most of the country’s credit-active businesses. Centrix creates consumer credit reports for local businesses, including banks, finance companies, retailers, energy businesses, and telecommunication providers. The agency also operates a commercial bureau that produces comprehensive business credit reports to help its clients assess the risk of doing business with their customers.

Monika Lacey, chief commercial officer at Centrix, explains, “We provide credit reports to clients so they can assess how likely it is that a credit applicant will be able to pay them back. A client may also need to verify an applicant’s identity in order to comply with anti–money laundering requirements.”

Centrix’s founders had to ensure the organization could compete with established international players in New Zealand, such as Equifax and Illion, by delivering innovative solutions and controlling costs. To do this, it had to implement tools and technologies that could combine disparate pieces of information to provide a single view of credit-active individuals and businesses.

Centrix turned to the cloud to launch its business while minimizing its upfront costs. Initially, the company used a shared cloud in New Zealand for production and Amazon Web Services (AWS) for testing. Over time, however, Centrix found its local provider to be too costly, and changes in its production environment would incur a significant expense.

Morgan Wadsworth, chief information officer at Centrix, says, “We knew we would outgrow our local provider as our business expanded. I was using AWS for personal projects, so AWS was always on my mind as an option for Centrix.”

Centrix viewed the cloud as an emerging model that would give the business greater flexibility as it developed, but securing support from technology teams within key stakeholders such as larger banks initially proved problematic. These teams expressed their concern about the cloud at that time by sending Centrix security compliance questionnaires based on on-premises data center infrastructure.

Lacey says, “Security is a key priority for Centrix. As a business that is centered on data and as a custodian of personal information, we’re subject to strict rules governing data retention and access in New Zealand. We take our responsibility as custodians of data very seriously.”

The launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region in 2012 proved a catalyst for Centrix to move production workloads to AWS. The business expanded its AWS architecture from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to include Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) for security through network isolation and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store sensitive files securely and reliably.

Centrix also uses Amazon WorkSpaces to run its desktops inside a VPC for management and monitoring in line with its focus on data security. “The security tools from AWS gives us the added confidence that we’re doing everything we can to make sure that our environments are as secure as possible,” says Lacey.

The company uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server to run a database that holds about 4 TB of data—2.5 TB of which is accessible—covering a majority of New Zealand’s credit-active population. Data for each person ranges from one piece of credit-relevant information from a single source to more than 50 pieces of information from multiple sources. The database also holds data from all businesses listed on the New Zealand Companies Register. Wadsworth describes Amazon RDS for SQL Server as the most useful of all AWS services because of the critical importance of effective data management to its business model and its role in minimizing Centrix’s database and data administration tasks.

Lacey says, “Our customers benefit from our bespoke integration solutions. AWS has allowed us to remove the burden of managing our infrastructure so we can focus on developing those solutions in-house.”

As a data aggregator, Centrix loads data into its systems to deliver information back to its customers. Data loading and response times are key metrics that set Centrix apart from its competitors. The business has seamlessly uploaded millions of records to the AWS Cloud and spun up new instances to complete the data ingestion process when required. Lacey says, “With AWS, we’re keeping to nearly 100 percent uptime and averaging a response time of 4 seconds for credit report requests. Customer feedback on speed and response times have been positive, which is great.”

She adds, “If our services go down, our customers can’t make a credit assessment, which then impacts their ability to conduct their business. Having a stable environment on AWS that provides reliable, accurate information is critical.”

Centrix is now looking at a range of AWS tools to implement machine learning–powered forecasting and to enhance fraud detection. Lacey says, “The good thing about AWS is that we’re well positioned to adopt new technologies or spin up new products as we need to.”

Wadsworth concludes, “AWS is essential to our business. Without AWS, we would never have been able to scale without friction and deliver a seamless customer experience.”

To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/financial-services.